Pickled to a Finn's fancy

Scandinavian Review, Autumn 1996 by Korkeakivi, Anne Roston

Helsinki's Autumn Herring Market

The docks along Helsinki's central marketplace are generally forlorn. On weekends, especially in summer, a few boats offering root vegetables, flowers and fish may tie up. Sometimes, a tall-ship race or a city festival will include them in its plans. But mostly they lie empty, home only to some stalwart ducks and a floating restaurant.

This suddenly changes the first week of October. For the last 200 years fishing vessels from all along Finland's southern coast have crowded the market docks that week to sell pickled sea delicacies straight from their prows.

Coming during the drab days between the end of summer and the first snowfall, when Finland dips slowly into arctic darkness and the drizzle can seem endless, Helsinki's annual Baltic Herring Market is one of those indigenous events that perfectly satisfies a foreigner's yearnings for the atmospheric. The sea is dark and deep, the fishermen's faces cragged but honest, and some even wear heavy navy turtlenecks and stocking caps. The wooden boats are homemade. Even the weather is usually obliging: either a gauzy wind-swept veil of rain or the clear sideway light peculiar to the Baltic coast in autumn.

The Silakkamarkkinat, as the herring market is called in Finnish, is more than just a sentimental tradition for the locals, and it is definitely not put on for tourists. Fishing is still serious business in Finland, especially silakka fishing.

Although commonly translated as Baltic herring, the slight and silvery silakka is not actually considered a herring by the Finns; in their opinion, a herring is an inch or so longer, lives in the Atlantic and is heavily exported by Norwegians and Icelanders.

The silakka, on the other hand, belongs to the Baltic and is about as basic for Finns as rye bread, cream or-to a lesser degree in modern times-smoked reindeer meat. It is, after all, the only food bargain in the country, except for potatoes (with which it is traditionally eaten).

What keeps the price of silakka down is its long-term availability. The season for the other important Finnish catch, salmon, lasts through the summer months, but fishermen trawl for silakka eight months out of the year. Moreover, the little Baltic herring (not even six inches long) swims in delightfully convenient schools and multiplies faithfully.

More than 10,000 Baltic herring lovers show up just on the first day of the Herring Market, trekking over the cobblestones of Kauppatori, Helsinki's central marketplace, and wandering from boat to boat tied up at the docks. By the end of the week, some 100,000 pounds of fish passes hands

There are various delicious ways to prepare the Baltic herring. One old-fashioned favorite, a rusk-battered and fried dish called paisettu silakka, is served with lemon, dill and boiled potatoes, and leaves a lot of grease on your napkin without tasting heavy. But the prime destination for silakka is pickled herring, and the annual Baltic Herring Market is proof of it.

With a couple of centuries to perfect their skills, the families of Finnish fishermen have turned the pickling of silakka into an art. Each family guards its own recipe, handing the ingredients down from generation to generation. If it comes to choosing between mother's method and your mother-in-law's, taste wins out, not blood.

The most straightforward recipe is suolassilakka, or salted herring, where a slippery handful of the fish is packed whole and upright in brine. From there, most families venture on to more complicated concoctions, in which the silakka is beheaded, boned (though you can eat it with the bones), sliced and set floating in a special sauce. Among the varieties commonly found at the market are sinappisilakka (herring in a creamy mustard sauce), tillisilakka (herring in a dill sauce), tomattisilakka (herring in a tomato sauce), kermavlisilakka (herring in a rich yogurt-like sauce), valkosipulisilakka (herring in a garlic sauce) and punavnisilakka (herring in red wine).

At the annual market, the basic ingredients are marked on the glass jars, plastic containers and small wooden kegs, called silakka nelikko, in which the pickled herring is sold. A recipe for valkosipulisilakka, for example, calls for water, vinegar, sugar, garlic, oil, salt, thin slices of carrot, peppercorns and "additional spices." Those spices, which give each family's product its own special taste, are kept secret.

Although a family's secrets may never be revealed, they are immediately put to the test at the market's two opening competitions: for the year's best silakka and maustekala (spiced fish with cinnamon and bay leaf, which is also widely sold at the market.). The judges consider the seasoning as well as the texture of the entries. It takes a panel of 10 herring connoisseurs a minimum of 4 bated hours with 50 or so pickled entries before declaring the winners. But the ultimate judges are the people of Helsinki. They swarm over the stone docks where the boats are tied up, to look at the wares laid out on tables on the vessels. With a social ease unusual for the reserved Finns, they chat with boat owners while wielding toothpicks to spear fish samples arrayed on the boats. Inevitably, a visitor to the market purchases a few jars.